. . . Biden, Fellow Democrats Put On A Circus

WASHINGTON — Not that the full truth is known, but: One of the powerful reasons for believing Clarence Thomas is that a trashing of him was predictable.

On July 27, 1989, this was the first sentence of my column about William Lucas:

''Another colored boy (the language suits the moment) is acting uppity in Washington, but there are enough liberals left to lead a lynching.''

The last paragraph of that column concerned the liberals on the Senate Judiciary Committee:

''What will they do when they have had their fill of the fun of trashing Lucas? They will turn their unspent indignation toward Clarence Thomas, the black Yale Law graduate who is President Bush's choice to fill the seat vacated by Bork on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. Thomas is conservative. More deviationism. A liberal's work is never done.''

In July 1989, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee were busy denigrating and rejecting a black conservative nominated to be assistant attorney general for civil rights. William Lucas, orphaned son of Caribbean immigrants, grew up in Harlem and put himself through Fordham Law School. Elected as a Democrat for four terms as sheriff of Wayne County surrounding Detroit, then elected county executive, in 1986 he became a Republican, was nominated for governor and lost. Three years later, Bush nominated him for U.S. assistant attorney general.

But because Lucas opposed reverse discrimination, quotas and the rest of the racial spoils system, Judiciary Committee Democrats, incited and even scripted by interest groups, found him unfit. White liberal politicians and their mostly white liberal staffs judged Lucas insufficiently ''sensitive'' to black needs, as those needs are defined by the civil rights industry.

That industry depends on enforcing the doctrine that blacks are permanent wards of government. Those who are ludicrously called ''leaders'' of what is laughably still called the ''civil rights movement'' make their livings mediating the dispersement of government benefits.

Thomas, like Lucas, represents a rising threat to the comfortable and profitable relationship between some liberal politicians and the civil rights industry. Thomas is a dire threat because of liberalism's now desperate dependency on courts.

Liberals cannot win the presidency and dare not try to legislate the racial spoils system by which they buy votes. So liberals have two terrors, one of which Lucas represented: Blacks who will not docilely let white liberals define permissible black political beliefs. Thomas represented that terror, and a second one: a judiciary that will not deliver by fiat the agenda that liberals cannot advance by democratic persuasion.

A perverse locution, one that helps incompetent and guilty people evade accountability, is now enjoying wide currency: It is that ''the process'' produced the scandal of the Thomas hearings. However, the confirmation process is not an autonomous and impersonal force. It is the product of the people responsible for the Judiciary Committee, beginning with Chairman Joe Biden and encompassing the entire Democratic majority.

The circus over which Biden presided was, of course, a bonanza for those conservatives whose goals include, and depend on, lowering government's stature. We shall see if the president learns the right lesson from the circus. It is: Be forthright and implacable, and direct all nominees to be so, on behalf of the jurisprudential and constitutional ideas that he promised, as a candidate, to promote through judicial nominees.

Judiciary Democrats grill nominees, pressuring them to disavow a long list of ideas - basically, those of Justice Antonin Scalia. The aim is to elicit from the nominees inhibiting commitments.

Let there be no more nominees who try to curry favor with committee liberals by bobbing and weaving and trimming and pirouetting away from old convictions and flirting with new ones. Nominate conservatives who like to fight but do not lust for the job. Nominate them, if necessary, one right after another, grinding down the Judiciary Committee and then go to the country, which today sees the committee as vindication of the intensifying contempt for Congress.